Thursday, August 03, 2006

Author Pics, Pt. II

It didn’t hurt that she took a good picture. A beautiful woman, tall and thin, her face incised with eloquent suffering, peering at the camera with cold, unwavering eyes, she looked as if her friend Giacometti had fashioned her out of skin and bones.

That's what they should have said. Instead, the description of Dana Goodyear's author pic reads:

I just think Dana Goodyear's pretty.

The first description above is actually from Ben Kunkel's excellent essay on Beckett in the New Yorker. I guess I just wanted to revisit the author pic problem because I felt bad for belittling the prettiness of DG and Joyce Carol Oates. But my point was that a male author's wrinkles become the incisions of eloquent suffering, rather than unsightly nose-to-mouth lines.

A simple point, but I'm a simple man.

This, by the way, was the Beckett portrait in question:

You can imagine how a similar portrait of a woman would be described. "Annie Proulx has a rugged, Janet Reno quality, unafraid to be unpretty. But she's such a good writer."

Anyhow, in that review, BK quotes Beckett at length and actually succeeded in putting "Molloy," a novel I had long avoided, on my must-read list:

She went by the peaceful name of Ruth, I think, but I can’t say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith. She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I discharged or gave up trying or was begged by her to stop. A mug’s game in my opinion and tiring on top of that, in the long run. But I lent myself to it with a good enough grace, knowing it was love, for she had told me so. She bent over the couch, because of her rheumatism, and in I went from behind. It was the only position she could bear, because of her lumbago. It seemed all right to me, for I had seen dogs, and I was astonished when she confided that you could go about it differently. I wonder what she meant exactly. Perhaps after all she put me in her rectum. A matter of complete indifference to me, I needn’t tell you. But is it true love, in the rectum? That’s what bothers me sometimes. Have I never known true love, after all? She too was an eminently flat woman and she moved with short stiff steps, leaning on an ebony stick. Perhaps she too was a man, yet another of them. But in that case surely our testicles would have collided, while we writhed. Perhaps she held hers tight in her hand, on purpose to avoid it.

Yeah, hoestly, I trouble getting through it my self, although there was one part about sucking on pebbles and another part about farting that were pretty good. Isn't that the book where Beckett askes "But is truly love, in the rectum?"You tell me. I might have the quote a little off anyway.

haha i quoted that bit in my post, and in fact almost used it as the title of the post, though i thought if dana goodyear ever googled herself she might be offended to discover her photo under the headline "But is it true love, in the rectum?"

Hmmm,speaking of vain male authors, has anyone noticed Paul Auster? Now that's a man who who took one good photo and has been recycling it for twenty-five years. I remember that I tipped a friend to that fact, before she braved a blizzard to see him read because he "looked so dreamy." She never made it in the end. Honestly, even Truman Capote would never dare...

At least AM Homes got a new photo of herself done for This Book Will Save Your Life -- (Hence, the chiaroscoro master's talents came in handy). Previous to that, I think I might have mentioned, Homes went the Auster route -- same photo of her at 25. Btw, that friend was the same one I talked out of going to see Auster...Solomon, I have faith in you. By the time you reach an extremely handsome, not losing your hair 40, you will want to advertise it.

Oh, Solomon, my craptastic dedication to reading have finally been revealed.... it's true I didn't read that Beckett quote at first, but now that I have been humbled, I went back, read it and sorta feel like maybe I should give the ol' bugger Malloy another chance, so to speak. Whaddya think? Maybe we could read it at the smae time and then chat?xo

Haze, I am indeed crossing my fingers that by age 40 my style will have reached its final destination -- Dickie Greenleaf by way of Fair Haven Heights -- and that yes, I will proudly flaunt my debonair roue looks.

But thank god I'm not a woman, because then I'd just be compared to Janet Reno.

"Very funny and very well written."
- an editor at The Nation

"You are so funny."
- Susie Bright

Categories

"Sharp & Punchy Commentary by a Team of writers that know the funny side of life, too." -Daniels Counter

"Extreme leftist propaganda" ... "written by a childhood friend of Cindy Sheehan" ... "sniveling liberals" ... "Man-haters, too. One of the contributors must be the originator of the Girls Rule, boy-hating theme" - various right-wing blogs

Contact Us

left_behinds at yahoo dot com

Best of Left Behinds

Ten Worst Americans Our group effort at coming up with the ten worst Americans of all time is our most heavily trafficked page. It's linked on many other sites as an example of "extreme leftist propaganda", but I (Solomon) am just happy to be getting the word out about number two on the list.

George Pataki, You Will Never Be President, So Stop Pataki's latest bout of pandering to the national right wing provokes AO to assess Pataki's viability as a presidential candidate. Sample: "In summary, you are dumb, uncharismatic, middlingly competent at best, not politically savvy, and somewhere between homely and plain."

Frank Gehry to Brooklyn: Drop Dead SG reviews Gehry's design for the Atlantic Yards project, concluding that "It's like some giant grey Transformer clomped its foot down on Park Slope. And imagine when in a few years all those pristine white beams get coated in soot from the neverending traffic jams that are projected as a direct result of this development (have you ever tried to drive through Flatbush or Atlantic during rush hour or on a weekend?). It'll be a Transformer's giant grey dirty foot."

Androphilia is the New Gay Didn't we learn anything from the pointless "queer" debates of the early 90s? SG gets all bitchy discussing butchness and some blogger's anti-gay gay neologism.

Why It Matters To Be Rational Part I and Part II In two excellent posts drawing on research from his day job, AO argues that the US is allocating our collective resources irrationally because of badly misjudged relative risks. "Terrorism is for the most part extremely unlikely ... Global warming, on the other hand, is 100% likely (it is already underway), and if left unchecked its damage will almost certainly dwarf September 11." Yet "the same people who believe in ghosts and ESP believe terrorists are gonna bomb their mini-mall. People cannot distinguish between real threats and fantasy."

The Science of Cuteness Think about a kitten staring up at you and cocking its little head as it blinks its big sleepy eyes. If you didn't just barf a little bit in your mouth, you're not trying hard enough to contradict the results of this study.

NYC Police Surveillance In this dispatch from the front lines (subsequently used by the Gotham Gazette), a Brooklyn activist discusses how years of police surveillance and harrassment almost succeeded in demoralizing her. Almost.

The War on Empiricism In a prelude to the risk posts above, AO argues that more people believe in haunted houses than in the scientific method. Somewhere in this post there must be some Dick Cheney jokes.

Why I am a Liberal, or, Napkins are a Stupid Place to Make Government Policy AO and the Congressional Budget Office force small-government conservatives to "defend low taxation on its merits: either taxes and government are evil and immoral in themselves (the idea the right-wing noise machine has been trying to cram down our throats for 25 years or so), or in utilitarian terms less government and lower taxes benefits everyone more than high taxes and more government."

Left Behinds Gets Spanked Our greatest honor of 2005 was a takedown in the very popular MILBlogging.com, where the man behind the milblogs (a man who SG had called "unnecessary and annoying" in a previous post) noted graciously that LB "looks like some third-grade school project written by some Marilyn Manson-looking blogger named Solomon Grundy, a childhood friend of Cindy Sheehan, and a few other contributors." And that was just in his first paragraph. But by the end of the bashing we were not just friends, we were lovers.